Even though the April 15 tax filing deadline has passed, you might be eligible for some health law-related changes that may save you money down the road.

–If you owed a penalty for not having health insurance last year and didn’t buy a plan for 2015, you may still be able to sign up for a marketplace plan, even though the open enrollment period ended Feb. 15. Many people who didn’t have insurance and didn’t realize that coverage is required under the law are eligible for a special enrollment period to buy a plan by April 30. If you sign up now, you’ll have coverage and avoid the 2015 penalty, which will be the greater of $325 or 2 percent of your household income.

–If you paid the penalty for not having insurance for some or all of last year and didn’t carefully check to see if you might have qualified for an exemption, it’s not too late. You can still apply for an exemption from the requirement by amending your 2014 tax return. It’s worth looking into since the list of exemptions is a long one. For example, if your 2014 income is below the filing threshold of $10,150 — or $20,300 for a married couple — you don’t owe a penalty for not having coverage. Likewise if insurance would cost more than 8 percent of your income or if you’ve suffered financial hardships like eviction or bankruptcy.

–In February, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced that 800,000 tax filers who received a federal subsidy to help pay their insurance premium and used the federal health insurance marketplace received incorrect 1095-A tax forms. These forms reported details about the advance premium tax credit amounts that were paid to insurers based on the consumers’ estimates of income. They were then used to reconcile those payments against how much consumers should have received.

If you filed your taxes based on information that was incorrectly reported by the government on the form, you generally don’t have to file an amended tax return even IF you would owe more tax. But you may want to at least recalculate your return, says Tara Straw, a health policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

“You have the option to amend if it helps you,” she says. Unfortunately, the only way to figure that out may be to do the math on the tax form 8962 that you use to reconcile your income.

Please contact Kaiser Health News to send comments or ideas for future topics for the Insuring Your Health column.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

Business groups praised a proposed new rule from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission clarifying how employers can construct wellness programs, but consumers advocates said the new policy could harm workers.

The EEOC published the long-awaited rule Thursday.

“This is a big step forward, primarily because the EEOC has defined what it means for a wellness program to be voluntary,” says Steve Wojcik, vice president for public policy at the National Business Group on Health, which represents large employers.

The Americans With Disabilities Act prohibits employers from discriminating against workers based on their health. But they can ask workers for details about their health and conduct medical exams as part of a voluntary wellness program. Before this proposal was unveiled, employers and consumer advocates alike had been uncertain how the commission defined voluntary.

Under the proposed rule, a wellness program is considered voluntary if employees aren’t required to participate, it doesn’t deny or limit health insurance coverage if people don’t participate, and it doesn’t retaliate against or otherwise interfere with employees who don’t participate.

In addition, as employers increasingly link participation in wellness programs to financial incentives, the proposed rule would also allow an incentive of up to 30 percent of the cost of employee-only coverage for workers’ participation in a wellness program or achieving health outcomes.

Consumer advocates say adopting such a standard would diminish employee protections.

“I think most people would say that giving people a choice of answering questions [about their health] or [workers] paying several thousand dollars is not a voluntary choice,” says Jennifer Mathis, director of programs at the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law. “That makes it coercive.”

Last year, the EEOC made a similar argument when it brought an action against Honeywell International.  The commission claimed that penalties in the company’s wellness program made the program involuntary. Under the company’s program, an employee and spouse could face financial penalties of up to $4,000 in insurance and tobacco surcharges, among other things, for not participating.

A federal district judge refused to issue a temporary restraining order sought by the EEOC that would have prevented the company from imposing its wellness program incentives this year.

“The EEOC’s proposed rules are a positive step toward enabling the implementation of the President’s health care law and the desire of all Americans to lead healthier lives,” Honeywell said in a statement.

In recent years, wellness programs have become a favored tool for employers who are seeking to encourage their employees to stop smoking, lose weight and keep their blood pressure and cholesterol under control. The Affordable Care Act allows companies to offer workers wellness incentives of up to 30 percent of the cost of coverage, or up to 50 percent for activities that aim to help people quit smoking.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.